Saint Barbara, baths, towers, and canons

[pedestrian]

Thank you arca_libraria for this Saint Barbara thread and to the posters above, you have jogged my memory.

Another Saint Barbara, this one a mid-15th Century polychromed wood reliquary bust of her, complete with tower:

   
(from the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection, New York, p.186, 'Set in Stone: The Face in Mediaeval Sculpture', Charles T Little [ed], 2006)

Attributed to the workshop of Nikolaus Gerhaert von Leiden, one of four busts - St Agnes of Rome, St Catherine of Alexandria, St Margaret of Antioch, and St Barbara - originally carved for the altarpiece of the church of Saints Peter and Paul at Wissembourg, a few dozen kilometres north of Strasbourg. Thought to date from 1465-67. These sculpture's of Gerhaert's (or by his workshop) were a new departure from traditional canonical representations, showing a more naturalistic style with a real sense of animation in the faces.

Isn't there something in the facial style that recalls some of the VM nymphs? Just look at MarcoP's example from f79v, above... 

What's the relevance, apart from being yet another thing-that-looks-a-bit-like-something-else? Maybe nothing. But following the thoughts in the posts above, this is a Saint Barbara with an Alsatian origin and perhaps a stylistic connection to the VM illustrations too. Was the illustrator of the VM looking at these busts? The carbon 14 timeline would suggest maybe not. Were Gerhaert and the VM illustrator both looking at another, slightly earlier set of faces, inspired by them? Should one keep in mind Koen G's and Nick Pelling's (and others') Lauber workshop observations - another Alsatian reference point - and building up taxonomies of calendrical/Zodiac/clothing images?

And here's one of the other Wissembourg busts, St Margaret of Antioch, who has lost her paint but kept her little dragon - not unlike the little VM creature sometimes interpreted as a 'dragon'. Legend had it that one of her tribulations was combatting Satan who appeared in the guise of a dragon, hence the dragon. In her dying prayer St Margaret besought God to grant that pregnant women be allowed to call upon her aid in delivery.

There's no real reason to draw any conclusion from these busts, but in a similar vein to others' comments, perhaps they help to feed an underlying sense of a time, a place, a set of styles, influences, and common visual cues - part of the context in which the VM was produced.

   
(from the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection, New York, p.183, 'Set in Stone: The Face in Mediaeval Sculpture', Charles T Little [ed], 2006))